Middle School Girls Send Their Names to Mars!

11/27/2018

Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart - Bethesda, MD

Several Stone Ridge Middle School girls, with the help of Middle School science teacher Flavia Huber, submitted their names to be etched on a microchip that was mounted on the InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander that touched down on Mars on Monday, November 26, 2018.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California put the names on a tiny 0.3 square inch silicon wafer microchip using an electron beam to write extremely tiny letters with lines smaller than one one-thousandth the width of a human hair. The dime-size chip is affixed to the InSight lander deck and will remain on Mars forever.

InSight successfully touched down on the Red Planet after an almost seven-month, 300-million-mile (458-million-kilometer) journey from Earth. Its two-year mission will be to study the deep interior of Mars to learn how all celestial bodies with rocky surfaces, including the Earth and our Moon, were formed. Learn more.

Schools of the Sacred Heart share in the educational mission of the Society of the Sacred Heart as articulated in the Goals and Criteria. The structure supporting Sacred Heart education in Canada and the United States includes the Conference of Sacred Heart Education and the Network of Sacred Heart Schools. Together they provide services and programs to ensure vitality of mission for the member schools sponsored by the Society of the Sacred Heart.